Research Interests

Argumentation, Rhetoric, Environmental Studies

Current research projects

The Rhetoric of Utopia

The project focuses on the process of environmental values transmission through the analysis of the rhetorical strategies of individuals, groups and organizations communication in diverse discursive sources in the public sphere, such as political discourses and fictional and non-fictional narratives. The study aims a better understanding of the values transmission to the practical reasoning, which can be extremely relevant, given the global ecological threats.

The multidisciplinary theoretical foundations of the research lie in the rhetorical criticism tradition, in the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation and in the argumentation schemes theory. Concerning data selection, the environmental ethics as well as the theoretical developments in cultural studies, namely the ecocriticism and the utopianism also provide research tools.

The goal is threefold: 1) to describe how values enter as premises in the argumentation, identifying the contradictions and conflicts of hierarchies of values underlying the arguments of those involved in the environmental debates; 2) to critically analyze how these arguments are organized into structures or argumentative schemes that can or cannot allow reasonable appeals to change attitudes and promote actions, i.e. how their organization can affect the effectiveness of practical reasoning, with regard to environmental issues; and 3) to inquire if and how these argumentation schemes can form clusters in order to persuade, thus being part of consistent rhetorical strategies.